Decentralized Learning System

You want to learn advanced, exciting new things? We got this. You have a hobby and want to find/share interesting pieces of advice? Cool! You are good at something and want to make some money out of it? You can!

The project

A tool that offers all you need for your professional growth, and also a way to share knowledge and get paid (or not). We are a trustless platform, which means you don’t need to trust us with your money. The payment layer is built on open source Ethereum smart contracts, so everything is transparent and guaranteed to work as expected. We are aware of the current difficulty in using cryptocurrencies and we are working hard to solve this issue through a nice and simple UX, while not compromising on security.

Four benefits you should know

Diversity

DLS Academy is a general purpose learning platform, so diversity is amongst our priorities. We offer an easy-to-use environment for both students and instructors, as well as a built-in incentive mechanism that will help the community grow and prosper. We don’t target businesses and corporations like “regular” VLEs, but the people who need it the most: students, beginners, career switchers, artists and so on.

Community driven

Building a powerful community around the project is only the first step. We will provide a permanent two-way communication channel, though which everyone can get involved, provide feedback, propose improvements, vote on new features and contribute however they can. DLS Academy will not be a dictatorship, but rather a democracy going towards a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).

Open source

We at DLSAcademy believe that education related tools should be transparent and open source. That’s why we pledge to make all our code open source as soon as possible, as well as encourage our community to help out with contributions. Access to education is a fundamental human right and should not be used by corporations as a pretext for making profit. While a certain level of education can’t always be free, we will enforce a transparent payment system through open source Ethereum smart contracts and incentivize a reasonable quality-price balance through a content curation system.

Decentralization

The internet of tomorrow will be decentralized, as it was supposed to in the first place. Corporations are gaining more and more power at the expense of individuals, and this is unhealthy and cannot last. Whenever we use a “free” service like Facebook or Google, we actually pay for it with our personal data. No big deal, right? Who cares what you like and what you search for? Well, they care because they are selling our data for billions of dollars while we are tracked and assaulted with intrusive advertising.

How It Works

Instructor

DLS Academy is an inclusive, welcoming platform created for knowledge sharing of all kinds. Anyone can become an instructor and publish a course on any subject from programming to cooking or photography.

Even more, instructors can publish video, audio or text based courses, depending on his beliefs or the particularities of the approached subject. For example, some consider a video based tutorial is easier to assimilate, while others argue that a text-based guide is a better option.

DLS Token

The instructors decide if they want to charge students for their course and what they think is a fair price for it. Although they have full control over the pricing, instructors have to deposit an amount of tokens equal to 10 times the course price, in order to enforce a cost-quality balance.

Smart Contract

These tokens are just locked in a smart contract until a minimum threshold of 10 purchases is reached. In other words, if the course fails to attract at least 10 students, then the cost-quality balance is not met because either the course is overpriced or the quality is poor. In this case, the instructor loses his deposit. The lost tokens go to a reserve and get redistributed to users who contribute the most within the platform.

IPFS

The course is published on IPFS.

The InterPlanetary File System is a peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol that enables distributed storage across a network of computers. According to their own description, IPFS is a protocol, filesystem, web, cdn, peer to peer and uses crypto, all at the same time. If it sounds crazy, it is. But only because it is cutting-edge technology that is about to revolutionize the web.

Student

Students have a key role in DLS Academy, they are also content curators, by reviewing the courses. This curation mechanism is connected to the reputation system, so reviews represent accurate, difficult to manipulate signals.

Besides learning from courses, learning groups can be created, where students with similar interests can meet and help each other through live chat or creating non-real time discussions. By offering a helping hand to his peers, one can be endorsed by them and earn extra reputation and benefit from token redistribution.

Certification

In order to increase their chances for a good job, students can apply for a certification that attests their participation in a course and the information they assimilated. This would cost an extra fee that is shared between the course author and DLS Academy, so everyone is incentivized to provide quality certifications that will be recognized by companies.

Curation Mechanism

Only students who paid the course’s fee (unless it was free) can review it and each student can publish a single review, so a malicious user who wants to manipulate the score will suffer some costs.

The weight of a given review is proportional to the student’s reputation; a review coming from an active and respectable user counts more than one from a new or inactive user.

Students who participate in the content curation process can earn extra reputation depending on the moment they publish the review (early reviews generate more reputation then late reviews) and the difference between their estimated score and the average score of that course (the closer these are, the more reputation is earned).

Technology Stack

Ethereum

Blockchain-based open source platform for building decentralized applications (Dapps). A new generation of applications that run on the blockchain, thus providing transparency, censorship-resistance, security and availability. Even more, because these applications run on the same blockchain, integrations between them will be trivial in most cases, so the more Dapps will be built, the more powerful they will become.

Smart Contracts

The backbone of DLS Academy is built on Ethereum smart contracts, written in Solidity language. All the core functionalities like transparent payments, reputation system, voting mechanism, governance model and even content storage will eventually be built on Ethereum and will take advantage of the rich ecoystem that was built around it, like ENS and Swarm. Our team is looking forward to new projects on Ethereum and we will constantly try to build integrations with other projects when it makes sense.

IPFS

IPFS aims to replace HTTP and build a better, decentralized web by offering high speed content delivery, eliminating duplicates of data in the network, making important content persistent throughout history and uses cryptography in order to provide security and privacy. The latter is the reason why IPFS is easy to integrate with blockchains, and Ethereum would be a perfect match thanks to smart contracts. For example, IPFS “links” (by which a file can be identified within the network) can be stored in a smart contract, and thus being timestamped and secured.

WHY DECENTRALISED APPLICATIONS?

We want to automate our business processes and exchange system in a transparent and immutable manner. As a result, to be able to cut costs and pass these savings on to our users.

We are a trustless platform, which means you don’t need to trust us with your money. The payment layer is built on open source Ethereum smart contracts, so everything is transparent and guaranteed to work as expected. We are aware of the current difficulty in using cryptocurrencies and we are working hard to solve this issue through a nice and simple UX, while not compromising on security.

Given the flexibility we provide for both content publishers and content consumers, we expect to see courses for a great diversity of domains, spreading from computer science to personal development or hobbies like cooking and traveling. Basically, anyone can create a course on any subject, so many interesting things are to be seen, that we don’t even think of right now. We are giving you the power to share knowledge; use it wisely and you will get the reward you deserve.

We offer an easy-to-use environment for both students and instructors, as well as a built-in incentive mechanism that will help the community grow and prosper. We don’t target businesses and corporations like “regular” VLEs, but the people who need it the most: students, beginners, career switchers, artists and so on.

Building a powerful community around the project will be the first step. We will provide a permanent two-way communication channel, though which everyone can get involved, provide feedback, propose improvements, vote on new features and contribute however they can. DLS Academy will not be a dictatorship, but rather a democracy going towards a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).

The purpose of the DLT token is to offer flexibility in building the economic and governance layers of the platform. We can experiment with models using inflation and deflation by creating and burning tokens, we can build a reputation system, we can even use it for governance in the future, so everyone can vote on proposals and their vote weight will be proportional to the amount of tokens they hold.

First of all, in our vision, the most important part of DLS Academy is our community and the best way to build a community is to align their interests with the project’s. Those who believe in the importance of this platform will also be directly incentivized to support it however they can, leading to a better valuation of our token. This way, more instructors will join and courses’ quality and quantity will increase, attracting new students.First of all, in our vision, the most important part of DLS Academy is our community and the best way to build a community is to align their interests with the project’s. Those who believe in the importance of this platform will also be directly incentivized to support it however they can, leading to a better valuation of our token. This way, more instructors will join and courses’ quality and quantity will increase, attracting new students.

Using our own token will also offer flexibility in building the economic and governance layers of the platform. We can experiment with models using inflation and deflation by creating and burning tokens, we can build a reputation system, we can even use it for governance in the future, so everyone can vote on proposals and their vote weight will be proportional to the amount of tokens they hold.

Instructions for participating in the ICO of DLT tokens will be posted on our ICO web page beginning at 8:00 GMT on the 15th of September 2017. Every investor can visit our ICO page where the sale instructions will be posted. The ICO sale will be managed by an Ethereum smart contract.

All purchased DLT tokens will be transferred immediately from the contract to your Ethereum wallet after purchase.

An ICO (Initial Coin Offering) is a derivative from the known expression IPO (Initial Public Offering, or stock market launch) which refers to cryptocurrency fundraising.

An ICO can allow the financing of a new blockchain, but in most cases, the ICO is set up to issue a token, a coin or to create a Dapp (decentralized application) based on an existing blockchain such as Bitcoin or Ethereum.

The cryptocurrency is currently the safest currency. Unlike cash, you cannot lose it or have it robbed. No bank will be able to validate your transactions or to take fees on your transactions. It’s your money and no one will be able to scrutinize your operations.